Categories

Meta

I wrote something hopefully a little more lucid regarding the similarities between “professional outrage” and “political correctness” as shutdown devices, and its meaning from the perspective of a “feminist killjoy”, over at the very cool Feminist Academic Collective site.

I can’t stop thinking about “professional outrage” as a framing device deployed to delegitimize opposition to hegemonic structures. Particularly interesting has been the migration of “professional outrage” from a pejorative used more commonly, at least in my lifetime, by those of a socially conservative persuasion, towards one that has found a fecund existence in leftist discourse. Tracing this transformation almost inevitably involves highlighting the experiences of various feminist projects. Why is this link to feminism so unsurprising? It might have something to do with the fact that, while feminist perspectives have undergone well-documented struggles in finding a political voice on the right-wing, they have all too often been treated as peripheral on the left-wing too.

“Political correctness” – inherently “gone mad” – is a term more comfortably associated with the likes of The Daily Mail and UKIP. Easy targets for our [feminist] ire, propagating myths of how oppressed…